Advertising policy

• Display advertising on our pages.
• Labelled sponsored placements, shown outside the ranked list.
• An enhanced business profile with richer information and media.
• Category sponsorship, disclosed on the pages it appears on.
• Newsletter sponsorship, labelled within the email.
• Lead tools and reporting for your own listing.

• A position in an editorial ranking. Not a higher one, not entry into a ranking you are not in, not removal of a competitor.
• Changes to an editorial assessment, including strengths or limitations.
• Removal of accurate information you would prefer were not published.
• Removal of a correction, or of a factual note about your business.
• Editorial coverage. We do not sell articles.
• Use of the words Editor’s Choice, Best, #1 or Top Pick in a paid creative. Those are editorial terms and our validation rejects them.

Every commercial unit carries a label from a fixed list: Sponsored, Featured Partner, Advertisement, Promoted. Sponsored placements are visually distinct from editorial content, sit outside the ranked list, and never receive a rank number.

Outbound links in commercial units carry rel="sponsored", as search engines require.

Policy alone is not much of a guarantee, so the separation is structural:

• Sponsored placements and ranking entries live in separate database tables with no relationship between them. There is no field a campaign can write that changes a rank.
• Our commercial role has permission to manage advertisers, campaigns and placements. It does not have permission to write a ranking or publish an article. Our test suite fails the build if that ever changes.
• Every change to a ranking is recorded in an append-only audit log.
• Our moderation tools do not display advertiser status, so a moderator cannot be influenced by it.

We do use commercial data — which businesses receive the most interest from our readers — to decide who to approach about advertising. That is the legitimate use. Our methodology explains the editorial side.

• No creative may imitate LocalRank editorial styling or navigation.
• No auto-playing audio, no expanding units over content, no interstitials.
• Ad slots reserve their space before loading, so advertising never moves content.
• We reject claims we believe to be misleading, regardless of spend.

Email [email protected]. If you are asking whether a package can improve your ranking, the answer is no, and it will stay no.